Conservative activists see opportunity as Romney and Bush go to war

MYRTLE BEACH, South Carolina – Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, and Chris Christie aren’t exactly popular names at the South Carolina Tea Party Coalition Convention. “Christie lost weight, but that just means he can hug Obama even closer,” Joe Dugan, who organized the conference, told msnbc. “Romney was a poor candidate and ran a terrible campaign.” That doesn’t mean attendees are unhappy to see them running, however. As Mitt Romney moves closer to launching yet another Republican presidential campaign, the former governor has told people close to him that he would make poverty one of the pillars of his candidacy.They intend to just roll right over him. “As talks over Iran’s nuclear program resumed Sunday in Geneva, lawmakers in Congress moved forward with legislation to impose new sanctions on Tehran, defying a veto threat from President Obama.

About six in 10 Republicans want to see 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney run again for the White House in 2016 — the most favorable reception among Republicans out of a host of possible GOP candidates in a new poll.The Sunday news shows had a ring of 2012, with President Barack Obama and his presidential foe Mitt Romney both grabbing headlines for their intentions to boost the country’s middle class. After watching Romney grind his way to the nomination in 2012 against a rotating cast of underfunded conservative challengers, tea party activists are hopeful that the reverse dynamic might occur in 2016. Friday night in San Diego, Romney boarded an aircraft carrier and was even more specific on this in remarks to RNC members. “Under President Obama the rich have gotten richer, income inequality has gotten worse and there are more people in poverty in American than ever before,” Mr.

Obama will use Tuesday’s State of the Union address to call for raising taxes on the country’s wealthiest Americans and biggest financial institutions in order to pay for middle-class tax cuts and other initiatives—plans that pundits said Sunday will go nowhere with the new Republican-led Congress. Romney, 61 percent say it’s more important to have a presidential nominee who agrees with their position on most issues, compared to 35 percent who say it’s more important to have a nominee who can win in November.

They also need to settle on a champion of their own and the anti-establishment field may be even more crowded in 2016 than it was in 2012. “Everyone is going to have to start coalescing behind one or two candidates as they go towards the finish line in the primary to really get enough votes,” Rob Maness, a Senate candidate in Louisiana last year, told msnbc. The Iranians continue to walk all over the West’s negotiating team. “The State Department was quick to explain that Iran is not barred by United Nations resolutions or an interim nuclear agreement from building new reactors. Meanwhile, 50 percent of Republicans said they wanted Bush, former governor of Florida and the son and brother of two GOP presidents, to run,while 27 percent disapproved of his candidacy. Yet by announcing the construction, the regime is making clear its intention to continue expanding, rather than dismantling, its nuclear infrastructure. The very idea of the Republican whining about the rich getting richer under President Obama – as if the hyper-elitist conservative feels justified going after the president from the left – is painfully ridiculous, even by Romney standards.

Granholm, who did not return our request for comment, is referring to a small but unwelcome bit from the last presidential election that did not help to soften Romney’s image as a corporate raider. (And we assume she is talking about tax rates, not tax amounts.) In the spring of 2012, the public learned that Romney’s plans for a multi-million dollar beach house in La Jolla, Calif., included an elevator to move cars from the basement to street level. Other candidates who could potentially make a play for social conservatives, libertarians, and tea partiers include Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee, Mike Pence, Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry, and Scott Walker. But there’s a related angle to this that hasn’t generated enough attention: Romney apparently hopes to draw attention to a problem he explicitly said must be ignored. Exactly three years ago this month, as Obama and Democrats tried to emphasize the significance of economic inequalities and a widening wealth gap, Romney said the topic itself is divisive and must be rejected. “I think it’s about envy,” Romney told NBC’s Matt Lauer. “I think it’s about class warfare.” Asked if “questions about the distribution of wealth” are fair or unfair, “I think it’s fine to talk about those things in quiet rooms,” Romney said, adding that for Obama to make this a campaign issue is “envy-oriented.” With these comments in mind, for Romney to suddenly want to whine about Obama and “income inequality” is rather pathetic.

And now, even as donors and other supporters push Romney to bring in fresh blood for a possible third presidential bid, he is still relying on the same team for advice, strategic counsel, and early moves to form a 2016 campaign staff.” The Obama administration promised to stamp out al-Qaeda. Still, Granholm’s claim hits on a big theme of the 2012 election about the tax code’s differential treatment of income from work and income from investments. That said, the fact that the failed former candidate is willing to pick poverty, of all things, as an issue he’s going to pretend to care about, tells us something important about the broader national conversation.

The massacre at the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo was the latest in an apparently escalating line of atrocities reminding the US voter that al-Qaeda and its offshoots outlived Osama bin Laden. Billionaire Warren Buffett distilled this down to the line that he paid a lower tax rate than his secretary thanks to the favorable treatment of capital gains. Some prospective GOP candidates like Perry, Walker, Pence, and Rubio could plausibly lay claim to establishment and grassroots support alike and Romney actually performed surprisingly well with tea party voters in 2012 (his weak spot was evangelicals).

Back in 2007, when Romney was still pandering to social conservatives in Iowa and promising to “double Guantanamo,” then-candidate Barack Obama said he was determined to shift the mainstream discussion to the left, just as Ronald Reagan did a generation earlier in moving the discussion to the right. It followed the Taliban’s slaughter of 148 school children in Peshawar, the staged beheadings in Syria by Isis and a hardening perception that the death cult is spreading. Given the tenacity of the gains of Isis in Syria and Iraq — it has held its ground in spite of US air strikes — and al-Qaeda’s strong advances in Yemen and beyond, it is hard to imagine this will change in 2015. After much pressure, Romney released two years of income tax returns in 2012 that showed he paid 13.9 percent in federal taxes in 2010 and 15.3 percent in 2011, a bit less than the national average.

The point isn’t that Romney has worthwhile ideas in addressing poverty – he doesn’t – but rather that Romney believes there’s electoral utility in raising the issue in the first place. Only one contender, Rand Paul — the artist formerly known as isolationist, also a senator from Kentucky — diverges from his party’s muscular line on national security.

Christie will be in Washington on Wednesday to meet with Republican members of Congress before traveling to Annapolis for the inauguration of Larry Hogan. If the installers were single with no children, then a simple tax calculator gives them a total effective federal income tax rate of 17 percent—more than Romney. Among Democrats, 85 percent supported a presidential campaign by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton while 11 percent disapproved, while a run by Vice President Joe Biden was backed by 40 percent of Democrats and opposed by 38 percent. And by about a two-to-one margin, 59 percent to 30 percent, Republicans say they would not like to see former Alaska Gov. and 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin run in 2016. On Fox News Sunday, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins faced off against former U.S. solicitor general and Republican attorney Ted Olson about the U.S.

Supreme Court’s decision to take up same-sex marriage this year. “Never once in any of those cases did it say that it had to be between a man and a woman,” Olson said. “Fifteen times it said it was a matter of privacy, liberty, association, dignity and respect for the individual.” Olson pointed us to a brief he and his colleagues filed as the respondents in the 2013 case Hollingsworth vs. The cases he cited cover a range of topics, including privacy and parental and reproductive rights, and span from 1888 to 2003, but all touch on marriage as a “fundamental right” in some way. The question was never asked until the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision to strike down part of the Defense of Marriage Act, ensuring same-sex couples get the same federal benefits as heterosexual couples, said Clifford Rosky, a law professor at the University of Utah. Until recent decades, some experts told us, the court likely assumed that when they said “marriage,” others would interpret that as meaning a heterosexual union, not a homosexual one, due to societal norms. Few will forget Mr Romney’s offhand remark that 47 per cent of Americans were “takers” (spongers), a phrase borrowed from Ayn Rand, the cultish philosopher of small government.

In his acceptance speech as Republican speaker of the House of Representatives this month, John Boehner talked of the urgent need to reverse the US “middle-class squeeze”.